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Monday, May 25, 2015

It's been awhile since I've written--or brewed--so it's about time I put something up here! The new brewery is sucking up all my time. It's slowly starting to take shape, but that's the topic for another post. I'm here today to talk about the "XPA" I brewed awhile back.

The idea here is something hopped like an IPA, but with lower alcohol content, like a pale ale. I like my IPA's dry and crisp, without too much heavy malt sweetness to get in the way of the hops, so I assumed the lower gravity would make that easier. Well I kind of missed on that one. With the high mash temperature, I ended up with a pretty full bodied pale ale. This is a classic example of why I can't wait to have the new brewhouse.

Other than that, I'm decently happy with this beer. I like the way the hops came together--I've been pondering this threesome for awhile now and it's nice to see it turn out as I expected. Amarillo setts a good fruity . The Amarillo hops were a little old, the hopback didn't quite give me all the aroma I expected, and I'm still not getting good extraction from my dry hops (the dumb cones always want to float). These factors all just combine to mute the hops a bit, and with the bigger body produce a "smooth" and "balanced" IPA. Like with my fresh hop IPA last fall, that's not exactly what I was going for.

I'm holding off on brewing again until I get the new system up and running, so hopefully no more of these "well it could have been good but..." posts. With proper processes and controls, each of these mistakes was easily avoidable. I fully expect the next IPA to finally be something I can be proud of.